Posted
by
Zonkon Thursday December 20, 2007 @04:21PM
from the even-if-it-doesn't-work-vista-is-awful-pretty dept.

mjasay writes "According to a recent analysis by IEEE, Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry in terms of overall quality of its patents. And while Microsoft came in second to IBM in The Patent Board's 2006 survey, its upcoming 2007 report has Microsoft besting IBM (and even its 2006 report had Microsoft #1 in terms of the "scientific strength" of its patent portfolio). All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Consumers and business users don't buy patents. They buy products that make their lives easier or more productive, yet Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to turn its patent portfolio into much more than life support for its existing Office and Windows monopolies. In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?"

(1) the patent was filed in 2002, while they didn't have anything out then, I've been using the microsoft power toy that patent describes since around 2005.(2) Read the patent. It's not patenting virtual dessktops, it's patenting accurate thumbnails of virtual desktops and using those to swich between the desktop (as previews). I'm not sure I've seen anything remotely as described before beryl on a *nix system. Is there anything that had this feature prior to 2002?

Unfortunately, whether the idea is outside of the direct implications of the prior art (or indeed outside of what is already common knowledge) is apparently judged by people who have no technical background whatsoever. Or don't you find that your usual reaction on reading a patent is, "huh, someone found the time and money to file this" rather than "wow! I wish I had thought of that!"? I know I do. At least when I'm not thinking, "I wonder why they are doing this in such a stupid way? Has someone already lo

May I ask what software used this previously? I'd actually like to know because so far, I've not found anything on a *nix system to do the same thing (short of beryl, which came after 2002, and isn't completely stable yet).

The concept is a preview of a virtual desktop (similar to what you would see in the virtual desktop manager power toy for Windows XP). If it actually performed well (unlike the XP app, which is a bit laggy), I'd love to have something like that on my machine at home.

While S/W patents are... ahem... problematic, patents themselves are a pretty good indicator that a particular person or organization is at least thinking about new and innovative ways to use technology.

Microsoft's problem isn't R&D, it isn't that they don't have smart, cool or interesting people (although I imagine it's getting harder and harder to find new smart/cool/innovative ones)... their problem is the business management.

The management of Microsoft (based purely on my outsider observations) desperately wants to extend their monopoly as long as possible, by any means necessary. Their basic playbook, and it's getting kinda worn by now, is to make (or buy) neat tech and then force you to use their existing tech to use the neat tech. The problem with this approach is that the existing tech (Win & Office) is basically a frankenstein monster at this point and by crippling their new tech to force use of the old tech they ruin the good ideas. All this takes place well after the innovative thinking takes place.

MS shareholders need to do something about the state of that company, otherwise they're just going to continue to piss money away and eventually find themselves just like IBM in the early 90's.

I think I'd be even blunter than you. Microsoft's profits come from a small range of technologies and philosophies that are often old at deployment, often weak by design, and fixed by the 'vision' of a small number of powerful people with strong personalities but extremely limited technical competence. Its strategy is to protect those profits, by limiting the extent to which innovation reaches the marketplace. This can be accomplished by destroying competition financially, by acquiring and dismantling compe

Does not mean making products. It is in regards to what they are doing with their money and what they are developing. Nowhere in there does it say "worthwhile" or "what people want"
Hurrah for flaimbait.

The article, I notice, is rather light on details about what sort of patents they're talking about. As the OP says, people don't buy patents--they buy products. So concretely, what sort of innovation is Microsoft involved in? The article doesn't really go into that.

Frankly, I think the patent system hasn't been a good gauge of innovation in many, many years. Patents are issued for everything from BS "perpetual motion machines" to the grilled cheese sandwich [patentstorm.us] are granted routinely.

I'm sure that there are lots of "innovative" patents in MS's portfolio, though I'm certain that many were purchased elsewhere rather than developed in house. Also, just because they are producing "innovative" patents, does not necessarily mean that their enduser products are. They seem to fall hopelessly short of the basics in reaching for the new and flashy. Example: wouldn't you think that an automated troubleshooting wizard for internet connectivity problems would flag a blank entry for the gateway? I re

I don't think that means what you think it means. I'm sure that there are lots of "innovative" patents in MS's portfolio, though I'm certain that many were purchased elsewhere rather than developed in house.

It does not seem that you are qualified to comment on the shortcomings of others, you need to work on yourself first. Those interested in what MS actually does in house might want to look at Micorsoft Research's project page: http://research.microsoft.com/research/projects/default.aspx [microsoft.com].

Also, out of house research is not necessarily patented. A friend did research on distributed shared computing in grad school. The project was supported by Microsoft, they had access to Windows source code, they were not restricted from publishing their research.

People dont like to admit it but MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever. Whether its good or bad that you can patent a lot of these things is debatable but at least they are producing some useful stuff as opposed to just using patents as a money grab like a lot of patent troll companies.

That page kind of misrepresents things, the apple wasnt really using subpixel rendering it was really just saying that you had 280 half pixels and you could use any two neighboring pixels to make one pixel that you would then use normally. The algorithms involved in cleartype are way different and substantially more advanced.

You picked a terrible example. Apple, IBM and a number of other companies had subpixel rendering long before MS.
But as is their standard practice, MS claimed something existing elsewhere as new and innovative and went for a patent.

I have extreme difficulty to read ClearType text. I think this is related to the way the eyes of some people work and that other people also have similar problems.

I always thought that everyone was seeing the same things as me (fuzzy text hidden in an abyss of colours) and I thought well, maybe the whole world turned crazy or what, until I told what I were seeing to some other people and I asked them what they were seeing and they said "soft black letters", and then I read about the issue a bit and confirmed that yes, I am one of these people who can't read this stuff.

One would assume that the purpose of text is to be read rather than to look pretty. In this regard, ClearType creates difficulties for some people whose eyes can discern colour in more "resolution" than other people (ie it penalises people who have better eyes).

Are you sure your monitor just doesn't have reverse ordered pixels? Most LCDs have BGR color ordering... but some have RGB. Sounds the same? It is very different! The following is a very zoomed in example of some backwards y letter I just made up. In the first, the font algorithm (Cleartype) thinks (correctly) you have BGR color order. In the second, the screen has RGB color order, and Cleartype thinks it is BGR (which is BAD!). Notice that the first one looks like a backwards y, like it should. The second

The clever part is that they used anti-aliasing on subpixels in text. You are not the first person ive heard saying that it was obvious or that someone else had thought of subpixel rendering first. But if thats true why didnt anyone else ever do subpixel rendering for text on lcd screens before? Its very useful, if it was so obvious I would think that other companies would have done it. I'm not saying its good that its all locked up in patents, but I do believe that MS did something useful here and they

All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy?

Microsoft has turned the business of chair throwing into an art. Nobody does it better than them. Why just a few short years ago, we were lucky to launch chairs more than a few meters. Even then they usually ended in a destructive fireball. Then came that luminary Ballmer. He changed everything. Next time you stand in awe of perfect chair-to-low-earth-orbit (CLEO, another MS patent), you thank Microsoft.

The blog entry looks like some roundabout way to try to plant the (erroneous) idea that patents equal innovation. The number of patents a tech company obtains depends mostly on how much money they are willing to spend on patents, nothing more. Microsoft made it their goal to get lots of patents to fight open source a few years ago, they have the money to do it, and they are following through. They are no more innovative now than they were a few years ago.

Microsoft Research [microsoft.com] is really cool. They crank out cool stuff all the time! Take a look! The problem is that most of their stuff never sees the light of day. MS just gets the patent then bury it and move on. WinFS and other neat things came out of there. They hire a lot of PhDs, too... James Larus, the guy that wrote SPIM (MIPS simulator) works there now...

If I pay a few millions and buy or even build an innovative R&D lab and let the PhDs there crank out super ideas every day and I never use them, I am not an innovative company. One department does not represent the whole company.

Clippy has been gone for so many years now that when ever I see someone bring him/it up, it automatically diminishes my respect for the author. The only thing more lame than dragging out Clippy would be dragging out Bob, or the hoax/cliche phrase "640k is enough for anyone" crap.

Not only are Clippy and Bob so incredibly horrible that they will be remembered forever in the annals of stupid computing, Microsoft stole the ideas behind them from Brenda Laurel, and got them all wrong.

The article only mentions innovation once. At best, MS is very good at making sure their ideas are covered in terms of legal paperwork. That does not mean that they are innovative or inventive. Like IBM and other tech companies, how many of their patents are defensive in nature given the state of Intellectual Property today? True innovation means more than patents.

It's pretty simple really, Microsoft has grown to large to truly innovate in the way that leaner companies with less of an internal bureaucracy can. Changes to code have to go through so many levels of approval that it's maddening.

One only has to look at the length of time it took them to produce Vista to realize that.

There are many ways to fail, to suck, or to do something wrong, and only a few ways to do something successfully, well, or right. I think, with this in mind, there's no need for further investigation into the size of Microsoft's patent portfolio.

Analysis of a video feed to generate a 3D model of the scene being filmed.

That minority space wall, but without a special glove and working.

Network LOD for fast-paced games that let one server drive hunrderds of clients.

2D neural-net based code that learned to drive a car (still only in the simulation phase.).

Any of which could have had multiple patents. A lot of what they do is impractical as a product now (the wall for instance), but is an investment in the future. Like in the early 90's when they purchased tons of digital rights. And some, like the Network LOD, are designed for developers to tie them into MS products.

But Microsoft, like AT&T when it had too much money, take a bunch of academics, give them money, and tell them to do cool things. After all, the whole deparment will pay for itself with a couple of nifty inventions.

You should mention the interesting research being done by them in robotics. Yeah, lots of fascinating research...

And yet their PRODUCTS are the Zune, Xbox360 and Vista: All uninspired copies of other products or marginal improvements on their previous products (which were themselves either copies or marginal improvements).

I wish once in a while people would note, at least parenthetically, that the U.S. Patent Office has become something of a joke under Bush. It's even been known to ignore its own rules from time to time.

Could I be forgiven for wondering if this might explain Microsoft's preeminence?

It just goes to show that the relationship of {number of patents : innovation} is a similar one to number of {number of security patches : security of the system}. It's not how many {patents/patches} you have, it's what they do for you. Apple, for example, is in the process of building another $10 billion/year business out of the multitouch patents that it has. One idea, a few patents to ring-fence and expand it, 10 billion dollars. That's a *good* idea. Microsoft has clever patents too, (eg: cleartype), but all that leads to is an argument over whether the alternative is "blurry" or "accurate", and whether cleartype text is "clear" or "anaemic". In other words, they gained support on their own platform, but they didn't managed to leverage it too much elsewhere.

Microsoft is *not* that innovative a company - it's bread and butter (80% of profits or so, I believe) come from corporations (not people), and corporations generally like "more of the same, please". There's nothing wrong with serving that demand, and [insert deity] knows they have clever people working there - the conclusion is that they don't *want* to be an innovative company - they're happy with the status quo, because it brings in gazillions of dollars for them. Sure, they'll have the occasional exciting new thing (how could they not, given their staff ?), but that's not the *company* focus.

In comparison, Steve is fond of saying he likes to run Apple as a small company, with the resources of a large company. That the cash-in-the-bank at Apple is because they *do* take risks, they *do* push the envelope that little bit farther, and that having a large wad of cash to fall back on is very useful, you know, just in case... Apple is ~1/5th the size of Microsoft (I think) in terms of staff, that's a lot of people, but they're spread pretty thin ("small company", "siege mentality", "more productive"), considering they produce computers, consumer devices, a major OS, several consumer apps, several pro-apps, as well as design their own hardware, operate a chain of retail shops (where most of the staff are), etc. etc.

Bottom line: Bill Gates said that Microsoft were one innovation away from being made irrelevant, and they work to protect their monopoly because of that. Apple's focus is more on the 'next big thing'. They take risks, and to do that you have to execute on new ideas. Apple is innovative, and its customers are people. Microsoft is protective, and its customers are corporations.

Really, all the article manages to say is that IBM and Microsoft patent a ton of shit, which is news to no one since they're enormous tech companies. The news post probably should be flagged flamebait or troll.All that aside, I could buy Microsoft being one of the companies that generates the most innovative ideas each year. That's more a statement of just how much different crap the company is into than any innotation per capita assessment. For example, I'd say the Wii shows more innovation than the 360

That's because innovation isn't measurable by the number of patents you produce. Let me tell you my patent story.

I used to work at a company that made a widget. Details left out because of possible NDA/lawsuit goodness.

There were 3 or 4 other players in this widget space. There are about 3 or 4 useful functions any of these widgets can do.

One of the other players decides to patent "feature A from this widget, combined with feature B from this other widget". A multi function widget, merely taking two functions from two widgets and combining them. In other words, peanut butter is ok, and jelly is ok, but putting peanut butter with jelly is *hugely innovative* and deserves a patent.

We held meetings and began to file patents too. They were all equally insane.

There was NO INNOVATION going on in these meetings. Just carving up the widget patent space - that has existed for years - with each of these little companies nit-picking each other to death with patent suits and royalty fees.

I know this is slashdot and all, but the person who wrote this summary is so hopelessly biased against Microsoft its not even funny... What ever you say, think or believe about microsoft. They are an extremely successful company. Your summary makes it sound like Microsoft is crumbling and worthless, but Microsoft is as dominant as it ever was, and there are NO signs of that changing any time soon. Yes there are competing products popping up here and there, and thats really a good thing.. but not one of thos

To Clippy? Consumers and business users don't buy patents. They buy products that make their lives easier or more productive, yet Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to turn its patent portfolio into much more than life support for its existing Office and Windows monopolies

"Clippy?"

The Geek never learns to retire a joke that was never particurlarly true or funny to begin with.

Slashdot will probably be still using the Borg icon for Bill Gates when the Gates Foundation wins him the Nobel Peace Prize for the

The size of a patent portfolio cannot be a reasonable measure of innovation, especially in this case given that much of the Microsoft patent portfolio comprises bought patents: patents are bought and sold just like any other commodity.

Secondly, a patent doesn't guarantee the given innovation ever reaches the market. To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product from going to market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product. As a result it's possible to argue that patents discourage actual innovation rather than encourage it.

You can't equate patents with innovation. Sometimes it's just an indicator of how big their legal staff is. If you want to use the number of patents as an indicator for innovation, let me suggest this formula I just pulled out of my ass:

The author of the posting clearly has no knowledge of the state of Microsoft software and development tools today. Take one look at the.NET Framework and not only is it a ripoff of Java, but it made huge improvements like making a language-agnostic programming platform (parially due to CTS and CLI) and allowing multiple syntaxes (yes even Java-like syntax) to interoperate. Programmers can work in their language of choice and the compiled code will interoperate with all the other.NET languages which were o

Okay let's be fair. I am a Linux user but Microsoft does have some innovative and very good products.The Flight Simulator line that they bought from SubLogic is actually very good. I love it and it is one of the reasons I keep Windows on my system.I remember Word way back when No one used Windows and WordStar and WordPerfect ruled. It required a mouse and no one used it because it was SO different. Excel was another really innovative product. It was so much better than Lotus123 that it made your head hurt. I wounder how many Mac where bought just to use Excel before It was ported to Windows.Visual Basic for all of it's proprietary nature did let a lot more people write code for Windows. Of course it let a lot of people that should have never been allowed to code to write code but that is another story.Visual Studio is a very good IDE.The calendaring features of Outlook/Exchange are very good.The XBox 360 seems to be the right balance of HD graphics and cost.XBox Live from what I hear is very good.So yea give the devil his due.The real truth is that everything is going to look like small beans compared to Windows and Office.

What is true is that Microsoft do not - indeed have never - innovated. They've taken existing ideas, either bought them or copied them then marketed the hell out of the result.

Examples:

Flight Simulator - bought from SubLogic. (You said this yourself!)

FoxPro - Originally produced by Fox Software, which was bought out by Microsoft in 1992.

Outlook/Exchange - Lotus Notes was a groupware product well before then.

Access - Originally plagiarised from Borland Paradox.

Excel - Plagiarised from Lotus 1-2-3. The two were basically playing leapfrog in feature sets before 1-2-3 bit the dust.

Word - Plagiarised features from WordPerfect. Won the battle primarily by being sold to the boss rather than the secretary who was actually typing the letters.

Windows - Most graphical operating systems of the 1980's-1990's were shamelessly taking ideas from each other. The bar across the bottom of the screen, for instance, was seen in RISC OS and CDE long before Windows '95 hit the shelves.

XBox Live - the PS2 offered online play, but Sony never really exploited this. Frankly, it was a little early because it predated ubiquitous broadband.

In fact, Microsoft can't even innovate at the very simplest level.

Microsoft Paint (yes, that crappy little paint tool which has come free with Windows since the Windows 3.x days) - Take a look at this [wikipedia.org]. It's PC Paintbrush for DOS - developed by a company called ZSoft.

This sounds contradictory, but think about it. Who were always considered the "top dogs" of sheer numbers of patents? IBM? AT&T? Maybe even 3M?

All have some success stories from their respective research divisions, yet nothing remotely comparable to the number of patents they filed for.

Truthfully, a lot goes in to taking a "innovative idea" and taking it all the way through to become a marketable product in mass production. I think some of these big firms just like to pay a "think tank" to work on "anything you like", throwing all manner of things at the wall to see what sticks. This ends up being profitable for them because of all the lawsuits they can file over the trivial patents other people end up infringing on by accident - and means they're likely to eventually come up with something really innovative, at SOME point in time. (EG. Post-it notes!)

Smaller, more efficient businesses will do the R&D only on things focused squarely on a specific goal they've defined. They won't have huge numbers of patents, but will have ones relevant to their task at hand. These folks get more products to market per patent than the "big guys" do.

XNA *is* an innovative product.See the 2006 DEMMX Awards [demmx.com] and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.

Microsoft Research [microsoft.com] is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs [live.com] is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.

Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.

Actually, if you look into the history of Clippy, it started out based on very serious research in machine learning and human/computer interaction. Researchers developed a very awesome system that watched what you did, learned your work habits, and could figure out when you were having trouble, and then make useful suggestions. The product development people took this research and made Clippy, and explained to the marketing folks how great this was (and it was great).

The marketing folks decided it wasn't coming up enough (who want's a revolutionary feature hidden away most of the time?), and so made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up.

I suspect that this happens a lot with Microsoft products. The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever--way ahead of, and far more useful than, anything you'll find on Linux or Mac. Then marketing turns it into a joke.

Of course, neither of those syntaxes is ideal. An ideal request syntax would provide a similarly simple syntax for making a query, saving the query results temporarily, and parceling them out to you in the requested quantity instead. That way, you don't run the risk of presenting things twice or skipping things as new rows are added to the table and old ones are deleted. It should also be possible to query the current data set against the results of that prior query, generating a new query with any new r

T-SQL always used to annoy me with it's fussiness about the order you specified tables when using JOIN'sI wasn't good enough to notice when I was using SQL Server 6.5, but I've never noticed such a thing in 7, 2000 or 2005.

On the one project I used MySQL for, I was relieved to discover that it finally supported subqueries, but they ended up being unusably slow because the optimizer couldn't seem to do any optimization between the inner and outer queries. I ended up using Java code for what I would've just done with a subquery in SQL Server. Of course, now I'm mainly working in Oracle, and I have an almost opposite complaint; subqueries (and frequently several of them) seem to be the only way to accomplish a lot of things that wouldn't have taken much thought in SQL Server.

T-SQL always had the edge by allowing you bypass its annoyances by using stored procedures and views but this has now changed since MySQL 5.I've only done stored procedures in SQL Server, Oracle, and barely in Informix. Informix procedures just suck unreservedly. Oracle PL/SQL is a decent procedural language, but the interface to regular SQL can be a bit awkward, and there's entirely too much iterative code needed for my taste. T-SQL is rather limited as a procedural language, but seems to do a lot better at letting you stay within set-based logic.What are MySQL procedure like?

I mostly pay attention to theoretical areas like programming languages and automated reasoning, and MS has made significant contributions in those fields over the last few years.

Yeah, and not only that, Microsoft seems to have understood that the first company to crack the parallel programming nut will be at the forefront of computing in this century. Lately, they have hired a few world-renowned experts in parallel programming and supercomjputing. Dan Reed (formerly of the Rennaissance Computing Institute [renci.org])

The thing is, where is this alleged research going? We don't see it in MS's products; this was stated in the article summary. This is always the answer trotted out when anyone questions MS's patents and MS Research.

When IBM comes up with some great new technology, like the damascene process (copper on ICs), SOI, etc., we see it in chips pretty soon after. It was only about 10 years ago that the copper process was invented by IBM, and now every CPU has it to my knowledge, as has for quite some time. Intel invented a "strained silicon" process, and their CPUs have it now.

So where are MS Research's efforts paying off? Research isn't any good if it isn't actually applied somewhere. Basic research with no obvious course to application has its place, such as with fundamental science like quantum physics, exploration of Mars, etc., but software isn't one of them. If you can't find a place to use your findings, you've wasted your time. Back in the 60s-70s, researchers invented new programming languages and operating systems, and pretty soon industry and academia were all using C on UNIX machines. But we haven't seen anything come out of MS Research that's made a significant difference in anyone's lives.

The thing is, where is this alleged research going? We don't see it in MS's products; this was stated in the article summary.

XMLHttpRequest
VC1
XBox Live and XNA
C#
Ribbon
Sharepoint

or those nice mice/keyboard that Microsoft makes, they get a lot of patents for those, or if SQL Server does something better in the next release, well they get patents for the new algorithm/method that helped them achieve better performance.

Of course, if you open your eyes, there's a lot more, and they are affecting millions of people.

Yes, you are reading it wrong. They are saying those are technologies in Microsoft products that came into the Microsoft products via Microsoft Research. The implementation of IPv6 in Windows came from a research implementation that MS Research did back around 1998, to further network research, for example. They didn't invent it--they implemented it to use for network research, but the product development side of the company got to benefit from that. They are including that as an example of why it is worthwhile to fund researchers.

As for the other things you list, some of them did originate at Microsoft, or Microsoft was among the first. Spam filtering, for example (no Paul Graham was not first with statistical spam filtering--he was the first to popularize it). And they have indeed invented quite a bit of photography analysis tools.

Microsoft Research is basically an academic research lab. The place their results usually go are peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (which is why most people here never hear of them). But they also work with the product development side of the company so that the products can include this stuff, whether it was something invented at Microsoft, or something that was invented somewhere else and MS Research simply contributed advancements to the original investment.

So if the GP stopped complaining then MS would make something better than the Zune? I think you have that backwards, son. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the open mouth gets fed. If I complain about a crappy product (not saying zune is crappy, never used one) the company may or may not take my complaints seriously and change the next iteration.

If no one bitches then they'll pat themselves on the back. I'm not a good judge of my own product, you are.

Please, enlighten me as to how much more would get done if people who do ACTUAL WORK had OpenOffice to use on a daily basis?

AFAICS having office suites that interoperate with different companies' suites would smooth business quite a bit. MS Office isn't so widespread because of its quality, it's widespread because only another Office user can interoperate seamlessly with it, and because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.